Here is Dan Solin’s brilliant explanation of how dangerous timing the market is (without inside trading, which I imagine takes a lot of the guesswork out of stock-picking to beat the market - unfortunately, the government frowns upon this, so I hear):
The odds of flipping a coin and getting a head is obviously 1 out of 2. The odds of getting four heads in a row is 1 out of 16. If you flipped three times and got three heads, what are the odds of getting a fourth head? The answer is still 1 out of 2. Past performance of the coin toss does not affect future probability.
The Smartest Investment Book You’ll Ever Read: The Simple, Stress-Free Way to Reach Your Investment Goals
This is a brilliant quote. It’s logical, inarguable, and best of all, provable. Look, you can write up a list of the things that may affect the outcome of a toin coss. In fact you could come up with an almost inexhaustible list - but still, you will never predict the outcome with any kind of accuracy. This is truth! Actuarial and statistical tables cannot determine the outcome for an individual - so why would you think any number of factors, modifiers, and further bits of information could allow you to ‘beat the odds’ at picking stocks. This is my argument with playing poker for a living - no matter how much you work to defeat the random factors in the game, they are never eliminated - therefore loss is inevitable.
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Smartest investment book you'll ever need?
Even Ramit Sethi, the newest hottest personal finance guru agrees about this book (The Smartest Investment Book You’ll Ever Read: The Simple, Stress-Free Way to Reach Your Investment Goals.) - he says “this is one of my favorite investing books.” On his blog, I Will teach You How To Be Rich h dissects the book and comes to the conclusion that it is smart, concise, and doesn’t come with any fertilizer to grow the author’s stature. As in, no bullshit. Works for me!
So why do I say the book is only one sentence long?
“In a Smart Investment portfolio, you hold investments in a group of funds that, in turn, have investments in all the securities (stocks or bonds) in a particular index.”
Yup, that’s it. Of course, there are a couple hundred pages afterward explaining the nuts and bolts of how you are going to implement this:
This is from a treatise of the book that further distills the rest of the book (emphasis is mine):
Solin recommends that investors follow Four Steps
1. Determine your asset allocation based upon your personal parameters (Note: author provides a multi-page asset allocation questionnaire to determine a specific score for each individual’s circumstances and risk tolerance).
2. Open an account with Fidelity Investments, Vanguard or T. Rowe Price.
3. Set up your portfolio among three specific no-load, low internal expense index funds in any of the three fund families representing the total U.S. stock market, international market, and U.S. bond market, or purchase three specific similar in composition ETFs.
4. Rebalance the portfolio twice a year.
It’s common-sense advice - particularly when Solin says that you do not need advisors, managers, etc to invest for you - if you’re investing an American family average (my investment fund is obviously much lower than some, but sadly, much higher than many), all they are are extra fees paid to ‘churn’ your investments, making it look like they are trying to make you extra money just by flipping around your portfolio. I’ll talk more on this in a later post, and share an experience a friend of mine had. Furthermore, I have lots more to say about this particular book, which I just happened to pick up from the library not because I knew anything about it or had heard anything about it, but because it was short. Lucky me!
I’m reading a new book about beginner investor strategy, and how to start investing: The Smartest Investment Book You’ll Ever Read: The Simple, Stress-Free Way to Reach Your Investment Goals. So far I like the tone and tiblre of the book - basically it’s saying that trying to time the markets or beat the markets by picking stocks is a fool’s game and a waste of money. It goes on to point out something that I knew before I even started learning about investing - people you pay to manage your stock portfolio do not have your best interests at heart. Now, before I get angry emails (or tweets - I’m on twitter too as the LateInvestor - are you? Add me if you’re into investing - I won’t auto-follow/auto-dm auto-reply or spam you with links to e-books - I am a real person, not a marketroid) from money manager’s, please know that it’s nothing personal. Just a fact of life that if you get paid to make trades for people and try and beat the market, then you will make lots of trades in hopes of beating the market. I suppose if it pans out, you could make some cash - but the law of averages would say the odds of that happening are pretty low, I suspect. I just assumed everyone would be as naturally conservative and suspicious as I am - I want to get hands on with my investment portfolio, right from the beginning, not just offshore it to some guy with 1 thousand other small time investors he lumps together and moves around like monopoly pieces.
Investing Online for Dummies - This is where I chose to start
Day 1 I’m starting out with NO prior knowledge of investing, and almost no financial knowledge at all. As I said, I started my research at the library:
The book I’m going to start with is ‘Investing Online For Dummies’ 
. I’ve never been a big fan of the ‘for Dummies’ line for learning computer programming, but I figured that since my ‘cup is empty’, something so popular geared toward a rank amateur such as myself would at least give me the basics to build on.
I can say I’ve already learned a couple little things about beginning investing, and 1 big thing for the beginner investor from it. It’s not a terrible read, it’s a little dry, which is to be expected, but more importantly is the big thing about beginner investing that I learned right off the bat. There are 2 kinds of investors - which type of investor you are will determine how much money you make. That’s about the simplest I can put it. Red the rest of this post to find out which type of investor I am, and which kind you are. This is dead simple and this basic beginner investor step could seriously determine your investing for the rest of your life.
Hi, my name is Jeff. I am a 36 year old software developer living in Las Vegas NV. I am married, with 2 children. I know nothing about investing money. 
